Utopia for Realists Book Summary - Utopia for Realists Book explained in key points

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Utopia for Realists summary

Name: Utopia for Realists
Rating: 4.4 (284 reviews)
Author: Rutger Bregman

Rutger Bregman

And How We Can Get There

4.4 (284 ratings)

26 mins

Brief summary

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman explores ways to create a more equal society through innovative solutions such as a universal basic income and shorter workweeks. The book challenges conventional wisdom and provides a compelling vision for a better world.

Topics

Wealth Socialism & Capitalist Critique Culture US Economics Economic Theory

Table of Contents

Utopia for Realists
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Think of how we can radically improve society and the economy for everyone.

Today, most of us are lucky enough to live in what, by historical standards, are conditions of great wealth. For most of history, people would have regarded our lifestyles as utopian. So what is our utopia? When we imagine a better life, a better society, what do we see?

The problem is that we have stopped imagining altogether. In fact, we aren’t even considering some pretty basic questions: Why are we working harder and harder, even though we are richer than ever before? Why are millions still living in poverty, when we have the collective wealth to end poverty completely?

It’s time to re-embrace big thinking. It’s time to imagine a new utopia, not as an unworkable pipe dream but as a set of evidence-based, utterly deliverable ideas for how to reshape society and the economy so that all of our lives are radically better.

In these blinks, you’ll learn:

why giving people cash is the best way to help them;
why GDP is a fundamentally unhelpful measure of progress; and
what single policy change could make the world twice as rich.

Today’s world should be a paradise, but it’s leaving us strangely dissatisfied.

For most of human history, life was, as the famous philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For centuries, the human experience changed little and was tough.

According to estimates by historians, the average Italian earned around $1,600 in the year 1300. Six centuries later, after a passage of time that saw Galileo, Newton, the Enlightenment, the invention of printing, the steam engine and gunpowder, how much was that average Italian earning? Still $1,600.

But in recent times, economic progress has occurred at an astounding pace. Today, the average Italian is 15 times as rich as in 1880. The global economy is 250 times the size it was before the Industrial Revolution. Things are now moving so fast that the price of a single watt of solar power has dropped by 99 percent since 1980.

As a result, in just the last century, billions of humans have reached a level of stability and comfort that would have seemed utopian to our counterparts throughout history.

After centuries in which hunger was a fundamental part of most humans’ lives, today, there are more people suffering from obesity than from starvation. We’re also safer – the murder rate in Western Europe, for example, is a full 40 times lower than in the Middle Ages, smallpox has been eradicated, and today, because less disease means fewer early deaths, the average life expectancy on the African continent is growing at a rate of four days every week.

In addition, our grasp of technology is such that, to a visitor from the Middle Ages, it might seem as if biblical prophecies are coming to life: Consider the Argus II, a brain implant that restores some sight to people with genetic blindness. Or the Rewalk – robotic legs that are giving paraplegic people the power to walk again!

Secure, healthy and rich by any historical standard, we are living in paradise. So why does that feel so bleak, and why are so many people still dissatisfied with their lot? Maybe it’s that with so much wealth, we’ve forgotten how to dream big. Blinded by our consumer comforts, we’re no longer thinking about making life truly better. The moment has come to consider again what progress and living a good life in a time of material wealth really means.

Giving free money to people is a remarkably effective way of improving their lives.

Life was tough for Bernard Omondi. Working in a stone quarry in impoverished western Kenya, he was earning $2 a day – barely enough to get by. But life got a lot better when the charity GiveDirectly gave him and others in his village a one-off payment of $500, with no strings attached. Bernard used his windfall to purchase a motorcycle. Months later, he was earning $6 to $9 a day as a motorbike taxi driver. The money had transformed Bernard’s life.

GiveDirectly follows a simple principle: Cash-poor people know better than anyone else what they need. Therefore, the best way to help them is to give them money. Cold, unconditional, no-strings-attached cash that they can use as they see fit.

The moment for implementing a Universal Basic Income has come.

Universal Basic Income, or UBI, is a scheme in which everyone receives just enough money to live on. It’s tax-funded, given unconditionally, and doesn’t require the recipient to work. It’s not a new idea – something very much like it was almost introduced in the United States by an unlikely supporter.

Before his disgrace, President Richard Nixon planned on giving every family $1,600 a year, or $10,000 in today’s money. It would be, he argued, the most significant social legislation in US history. In the end, facing political opposition in Congress, Nixon abandoned the idea. It seemed thinkable then, but UBI is certainly possible now.

Gross domestic product is a perverse and outdated way of measuring progress; it needs replacing.

To listen to politicians or economic commentators, you’d think that gross domestic product, or GDP, was a wholly reliable measure of a nation’s well-being. In reality, though, GDP should no longer be trusted as a yardstick for a nation’s progress.

What is GDP? Well, it’s the sum of goods and services produced in a country, adjusted for things like seasonal variations and inflation. So far, so good. But there are a few fundamental problems with it.

We should embrace the myriad benefits of a 15-hour working week.

In summer 1930, while giving a lecture in Madrid, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a striking prediction: by 2030, vast economic growth would mean a 15-hour workweek. Well, Keynes was right about rocketing economic growth, but why was he wrong about us working fewer hours?

Economic growth in the nineteenth and twentieth century did lead to some reductions in working hours. The capitalist-to-his-bones car manufacturer, Henry Ford, discovered that shortening his employees’ workweek increased their productivity. He happily told journalists that more leisure was a “cold business fact,” offering effective, rested workers who also had enough leisure time to buy and use his cars. And Ford wasn’t alone. By the 1960s, the Rand Corporation think-tank foresaw a future economy in which just 2 percent of people needed to work to meet all of society’s needs.

How we prioritise which jobs are prestigious or well-paid is all wrong.

In February 1968, 7,000 angry sanitation workers gathered in New York in response to failed pay negotiations. As one garbageman said, they were fed up of people treating them like dirt. They were going on strike.

In Ireland, in May 1970, the country’s bank employees went on strike following lengthy but unsuccessful wage negotiations.

Our economy is fundamentally changing, and technology poses a greater threat to jobs than ever before.

In the early nineteenth century, English factory owner William Cartwright introduced a new type of loom. Each machine replaced the jobs of four skilled weavers. In the following months, unemployed workers formed a radical faction intent on destroying machinery. Machines, said one rebel named William Leadbetter, “will be the destruction of the universe.” The group called themselves the Luddites.

Throughout history, people have warned of the impact of machines on jobs. But today, most people would say that the Luddites and other fear-mongers got it wrong. After all, we aren’t all unemployed. Nonetheless, there are reasons to be more worried than ever before about the impact of technology on jobs.

We can either use tax to redistribute the wealth of the coming machine age or descend into ever-greater inequality.

It seems possible that the Luddites’ anti-technology fears weren’t wrong, though perhaps just a little premature; maybe we really are doomed to be beaten in our race against the machine. After all, we may be about to reach a tipping point in which developments in computing power and artificial intelligence radically change everything.

Futurologist Ray Kurzweil ardently believes that computers will be as smart as people by 2029 and that by 2045 they may be a billion times more intelligent than all human brains together. Now, Kurzweil is known for his wildness as much as his genius. But we should be wary of dismissing his predictions, just as we would have been wrong to dismiss Gordon Moore’s analysis of computing progression back in the 1960s.

If we really want to use our wealth to build a utopia, we need to open up the world’s borders.

Imagine there was a single measure that wouldn’t just ameliorate poverty but eradicate it? And imagine that measure would make all of us richer, as well? Surely we’d take it, right?

Well, unfortunately, we probably wouldn’t. Not right now. Because that measure is to open all borders.

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What is Utopia for Realists about?

Utopia for Realists (2016) is a call to arms for a radical rethinking of life, work and how society functions. It argues that the world enjoys unprecedented wealth and material comfort but is still full of problems, from soul-destroying jobs to inequality and poverty. We have the power to solve these problems and build a better future if we embrace utopian thinking.

Utopia for Realists Review

Utopia for Realists (2017) presents a thought-provoking exploration of bold ideas for creating a better society. Here's why this book is worth reading:

This book provides groundbreaking proposals, such as a universal basic income and a shorter workweek, challenging conventional wisdom and offering new perspectives.
With sharp analysis and compelling evidence, it convincingly argues for the feasibility and benefits of these utopian ideas.
The author's ability to draw on historical examples and contemporary research makes this book engaging, eye-opening, and far from boring.

Best quote from Utopia for Realists

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. – Oscar Wilde

—Rutger Bregman

Who should read Utopia for Realists?

Blue-sky thinkers
Socially engaged people who want to eradicate poverty
Frustrated citizens who feel there must be a better way to organize our society and economy

About the Author

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, author and internet sensation. His 2017 TED Talk “Poverty isn’t a lack of character; It’s a lack of cash” has been viewed 2.7 million times, and he was catapulted to internet fame by a clip of him at the 2019 Davos conference criticizing billionaires about taxation. A renowned advocate of Universal Basic Income, Bregman has published four other books in Dutch.

Categories with Utopia for Realists

Society & Culture Economics

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